Fraser Lake Elementary Secondary School

I. General Information

School Name: Fraser Lake Elementary Secondary School

School District: SD#91 Nechako Lakes

Inquiry Team Members: Duncan Wood dwood@sd91.bc.ca
Melanie Bokvist mbokvist@sd91.bc.ca
Anna Mann amann@sd91.bc.ca
Shawn Lank slank@sd91.bc.ca
Heather Derkson hderkson@sd91.bc.ca

Inquiry Team Contact Email: hderkson@sd91.bc.ca

II. Inquiry Project Information

Type of Inquiry: Indigenous Education Impact Initiative

Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Secondary (8-12)

Curricular Areas Addressed: Applied Design, skills & Technology, Career Education, Language Arts – Oral Language, Physical & Health Education, Other: Social Emotional

Focus Addressed: Local Indigenous Knowledges, Core competencies (for example, thinking, communication, personal and social), Land, Nature or Place-based learning, Self-regulation

In one sentence, what is your focus for the 3-year cycle? What the impact of increased student engagement could have on attendance and completion rates.

III. Spirals of Inquiry Details

Connections to Year 1: This year was the planning and creating of the new school house system; next year will be our first year implementing it. We anticipate that we may need to refocus and reassess our assumptions at the end of next year. We have discussed starting off slow and implementing things one step at a time, but the majority of the group wants to jump in with both feet and see what sticks.

Our hunch is that by making school fun we can increase student involvement in school sports and increase attendance rates; by getting the kids here, we can maybe increase student success and completion rates. Because we will be having house team meetings at least once a month, we are also looking at increasing homeroom time to increase student planning success and have homeroom teachers work with students on course completion, study skills, career/life planning and social skills.

New Educator Professional Learning: We have borrowed heavily from the house system attempted by a neighbouring school and have worked to make it our own. The use of local Indigenous fish names is a way of honouring the land and place. We are using the colours that are connected to our school and have changed a few things.

Taking Action: We have decided to create three house teams that include teachers and staff. Each team will be assigned a colour and a fish name. We are looking at having at least one team meeting a month where teams can work on logos, event planning and team connectedness. As an introduction to the house system for next year, we did a fun practice assembly. At this event we saw a lot more involvement, students were cheering each other on, and we had a lot more kids willing to participate.

We had our leadership group plan and lead the games. They gave each student that came into the gym an envelope with a coloured piece of paper. When they were instructed to, they opened their envelope to see what team they were on. Teams of kids played against each other in pool noodle hockey, trivia, and capture the flag. For each of the games, teams earned points that were visually displayed after each competition. After the assembly, we had all of the students participate in a survey asking for feedback on the planning process for next year. We had a huge number of students respond, and there was a lot of positive feedback.

Reflections for Year 2: The practice activity assembly showed promising results. There was a lot of excitement about the house system for next year and the practice events went well. We have to figure out how to work with our existing student leadership group without taking away from the activities they normally run.

Plans for Year 3: We need to find a system that we can use to track the scores. We thought we would use GooseChase, but it won’t work. Many other programs that are available aren’t supported by BC privacy laws, so we will have to get a spreadsheet and big tracking boards for the visual.

We will use GooseChase for the mini events and transfer the points onto the spreadsheet. We are also looking into connecting the Service bonus points to the community. We are looking into figuring out how to engage the community with the house system bonus points — possibly having online service submissions or something like that, so that community members can nominate students for recognition of services committed in the community. For example, a student helps mow their neighbours lawn, their neighbour can nominate them for Service bonus points. These bonus points will be added to their team points.